e--_a parte post_. But, unfortunately, it
happens that I remember none of my previous existences, and perhaps it
is impossible that I should remember them, for two things absolutely and
completely identical are but one. Instead of supposing that we live in a
finite universe, composed of a finite number of irreducible primary
elements, suppose that we live in an infinite universe, without limits
in space--which concrete infinity is not less inconceivable than the
concrete eternity in time--then it will follow that this system of
ours, that of the Milky Way, is repeated an infinite number of times in
the infinite of space, and that therefore I am now living an infinite
number of lives, all exactly identical. A jest, as you see, but one not
less comic--that is to say, not less tragic--than that of Nietzsche,
that of the laughing lion. And why does the lion laugh? I think he
laughs with rage, because he can never succeed in finding consolation in
the thought that he has been the same lion before and is destined to be
the same lion again.

But if Spinoza and Nietzsche were indeed both rationalists, each after
his own manner, they were not spiritual eunuchs; they had heart,
feeling, and, above all, hunger, a mad hunger for eternity, for
immortality. The physical eunuch does not feel the need of reproducing
himself carnally, in the body, and neither does the spiritual eunuch
feel the hunger for self-perpetuation.

Certain it is that there are some who assert that reason suffices them,
and they counsel us to desist from seeking to penetrate into the
impenetrable. But of those who say that they have no need of any faith
in an eternal personal life to furnish them with incentives to living
and motives for action, I know not well how to think. A man blind from
birth may also assure us that he feels no great longing to enjoy the
world of sight nor suffers any great anguish from not having enjoyed it,
and we must needs believe him, for what is wholly unknown cannot be the
object of desire--_nihil volitum quin praecognitum_, there can be no
volition save of things already known. But I cannot be persuaded that he
who has once in his life, either in his youth or for some other brief
space of time, cherished the belief in the immortality of the soul, will
ever find peace without it. And of this sort of blindness from birth
there are but few instances among us, and then only by a kind of strange
aberration. For the merely and exclusivel